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Video: Remembering fitness guru Jack LaLanne

Transcript of: Remembering fitness guru Jack LaLanne

BRIAN WILLIAMS, anchor:The man we thought might
live forever
has died.
Jack LaLanne
did more to promote and popularize
physical fitness
than any other American individual. And he started doing it so long ago, he was roundly criticized at the time for his crazy ideas.

Mr. JACK LaLANNE:Get up on your feet and let's go, everybody!

WILLIAMS:"The
Jack LaLanne
Show," which millions of us were raised on, started on local
TV inSan Francisco
, featuring
Jack
and his dog named
Happy
, and then it went national in
1959
. He lifted weights back when nobody else did, back when stretching and aerobics were considered oddities.
Jack
was like a hyperactive uncle in a blue polyester jumpsuit with a built-in belt who cajoled Americans into getting up and getting moving, often along with his wife,
Elaine LaLanne
. He was 5'6" and weighed all of 150 pounds. He worked out two hours a day, every day, not because he loved it, because he wanted to stay fit.

Mr. LaLANNE:To live long you've got to train like you're training for an athletic event. You've got to exercise. Exercise is king, nutrition's queen. Put them together, you've got a kingdom.

WILLIAMS:He did all kinds of stunts to promote fitness and himself: swimming to
Alcatraz
, towing boats behind him. He opened that famous chain of fitness spas. And
TV
viewers in recent years know him from hocking the
Power Juicer
. While his 3,000
TV shows
will live on forever,
Jack LaLanne

LOS ANGELES — Jack LaLanne, the fitness guru who inspired television viewers to trim down, eat well and pump iron for decades before diet and exercise became a national obsession, died Sunday. He was 96.

LaLanne died of respiratory failure due to pneumonia Sunday afternoon at his home in Morro Bay on California's central coast, his longtime agent Rick Hersh said.

LaLanne ate healthy and exercised every day of his life up until the end, Hersh said.

"I have not only lost my husband and a great American icon, but the best friend and most loving partner anyone could ever hope for," Elaine LaLanne, LaLanne's wife of 51 years and a frequent partner in his television appearances, said in a written statement.

He maintained a youthful physique and joked in 2006 that "I can't afford to die. It would wreck my image."

"He never lost enthusiasm for life and physical fitness," the 87-year-old Barker told The Associated Press on Sunday. "I saw him in about 2007 and he still looked remarkably good. He still looked like the same enthusiastic guy that he always was."

Television stapleLaLanne (pronounced lah-LAYN') credited a sudden interest in fitness with transforming his life as a teen, and he worked tirelessly over the next eight decades to transform others' lives, too.

"The only way you can hurt the body is not use it," LaLanne said. "Inactivity is the killer and, remember, it's never too late."

His workout show was a television staple from the 1950s to the '70s. LaLanne and his dog Happy encouraged kids to wake their mothers and drag them in front of the television set. He developed exercises that used no special equipment, just a chair and a towel.

He also founded a chain of fitness studios that bore his name and in recent years touted the value of raw fruit and vegetables as he helped market a machine called Jack LaLanne's Power Juicer.

When he turned 43 in 1957, he performed more than 1,000 push-ups in 23 minutes on the "You Asked For It" television show. At 60, he swam from Alcatraz Island to Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco — handcuffed, shackled and towing a boat. Ten years later, he performed a similar feat in Long Beach harbor.

"I never think of my age, never," LaLanne said in 1990. "I could be 20 or 100. I never think about it, I'm just me. Look at Bob Hope, George Burns. They're more productive than they've ever been in their whole lives right now."

Praised by SchwarzeneggerFellow bodybuilder and former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger credited LaLanne with taking exercise out of the gymnasium and into living rooms.

"He laid the groundwork for others to have exercise programs, and now it has bloomed from that black and white program into a very colorful enterprise," Schwarzenegger said in 1990.

In 1936 in his native Oakland, LaLanne opened a health studio that included weight-training for women and athletes. Those were revolutionary notions at the time, because of the theory that weight training made an athlete slow and "muscle bound" and made a woman look masculine.

"You have to understand that it was absolutely forbidden in those days for athletes to use weights," he once said. "It just wasn't done. We had athletes who used to sneak into the studio to work out.